About the artist:
Idris Khan works with the digital superimposition of reproductions of paintings, photographs, texts and, more recently, musical scores. In so doing, the images used in his works are always intimately linked in terms of content - this linkage can be a matter of logic or chance. Khan's work explores the history of photography and literature - whether it be iconic works by Roland Barthes or the Bechers - exploring the beauty of repetition and the anxieties of authorship. As Khan says, "it's obviously not about re-photographing the photographs to make exact copies, but to intervene and bring a spectrum of feelings - warmth, humour, anxiety - to what might otherwise be considered cool aloof image. You can see the illusion of my hand in the layering. It looks like a drawing. It's not systematic or uniform. The opacity of every layer is a different fallible, human decision".
For his trilogy based on the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Khan superimposed all the photographs of a particular group (for example, a certain type of timber house) on top of one another. He applied a similar approach to the sheet music of Chopin's Etudes, combining all the musical lines of this group of works in a single line. The results create an energetic tension where the notion of linear time seems suspended and where the two-dimensional image almost vibrates in three-dimensional way. Last year Idris Khan extended his approach to the medium of film in 'A Memory, after Bach's Cello Suites'.
Idris Khan (born 1978) is a graduate of the Royal College of Art in London where he still lives. Khan's work has been shown in exhibitions in London (Victoria Miro), Paris (Yvon Lambert), New York (Yvon Lambert) and San Francisco (Fraenkel).